We Too Are Children
This blog written by Ariel S. Winter catalogs children’s literature by adult authors of the 21st century which are apparently currently out of print. My faves: The Cat and the Devil by James Joyce, which is actually back in print now, all of these by Langston Hughes, and Andy Warhol’s Card Games Are Fun.
The name Ariel S. Winter reminds me of Jonathan Winters. Where do people get these names anyway? Jack Pendarvis blogged about him today. Jack Pendarvis is an adult author who really should write some children’s fiction. I think people who made up fairy tales like those of the Brothers Grimm probably had a mind very much like that of Mr. Pendarvis.
On my breaks from subbing a class of fourth graders at an international school, I read a lot of Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States. In his introduction Zinn defends the adaptation of his book from critics who I’m sure did denounce the book for presenting children with an alternate view of the American history they are still in the process of learning. I don’t remember exactly what he said exactly, but it was pretty much along the lines of: Most people treat children like children even though they understand everything that’s going on just as well as anyone. My feeling on this is that most people who treat children like children and think they can’t handle the Truth! haven’t been around children very much. READ MORE >
Oh, Sweet Valley Confidential!
I have an intense attachment to the books I loved as a child and teenager. I think we all do. As you might imagine, when I learned there would be a new addition go the Sweet Valley High canon, I clutched my pearls and lost my shit. I started reading Sweet Valley Confidential when it downloaded to my Kindle at 2:30 in the morning on the day it was released. Ten years have passed since we last encountered our heroines, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield. Everything has changed and yet, truly, nothing has changed in Sweet Valley, California. Almost every woman I know who is my age or thereabouts is reading this book right now and it has little to do with the book itself (terribly, terribly written) or the plot (horribly contrived and outlandish). It’s about remembering how much we loved the original series, and following the lives of The Twins, who were perfect, All-American girls we either loved or loved to hate. I have every reason in the world to hate everything about these books but I don’t. I love them, unabashedly and I will admit that I love this reboot, too. The drama! The scandal! Knowing where they are now!
In the original series, nearly every book began with a breathless description of The Twins and their blonde perfection. It did my heart good to see that SVC has not strayed too far from the path:
Like the twins of that poem, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield appeared interchangeable, if you considered only their faces.
And what faces they were.
Gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. The kind you couldn’t stop looking at. Their eyes were shades of aqua that danced in the light like shards of precious stones, oval and fringed with thick, light brown lashes long enough to cast a shadow on their cheeks. Their silky blond hair, the cascading kind, fell just below their shoulders. And to complete the perfection, their rosy lips looked as if they were penciled on. There wasn’t a thing wrong with their figures, either. It was as if billions of possibilities all fell together perfectly.
Twice.
Who else is reading this? Fess up!
“Sweet Potatoes” etc
My desk is messy but on Wednesday Joe and I did a lot of work around HQ. We took down the old artish and put up some new pictures and my favorite thing was finally figuring out a way to display my chapbooks in a rack. I kept putting in chapbooks that I had in boxes and getting excited and showing them to Joe. Like, JOE! LOOK AT THIS TITLE “FALLING STARS TO SMASH MOTHERFUCKERS IN THEIR FACE”! AH HAHA AND LOOK AT THIS ONE! “CONGRATULATIONS! THERE’S NO LAST PLACE IF EVERYONE IS DEAD” – okay so maybe those titles are kind of pessimistic but there are a lot of other ones that I liked. I kept also being like JOE! THERE’S A LOT OF CHAPBOOKS IN HERE A PERSON WOULD ACTUALLY WANT TO READ!
Life is moving too fast. I can’t keep up with things like the Internet. HTMLGiant is fast like the wind — beyond me. I don’t know what’s going on anywhere. I don’t like the feeling. I feel like I’m withdrawing into my own small world of rush. I can’t talk crap about people anymore because I don’t know what anyone is doing. READ MORE >
Literature as a Two-Way Conversation
After we posted about reading Alexander Chee’s blog Koreanish as though it were a book whose ending hasn’t yet been written, Chee tried to read Koreanish as though it were a book whose ending hasn’t yet been written, and he was surprised that what he found was different from what he thought he would find. An excerpt:
“What struck me, in other words, is that Koreanish the blog, is, if read narratively, something of a dystopic novel, in which a writer is living inside a country that is blind to its own destruction, a destruction it pursues relentlessly, to his increasing dismay.” (Read the rest at Koreanish.)
It’s a strange feeling to read a blog as a book whose ending hasn’t yet been written, then to have your note about reading the blog as a book whose ending hasn’t yet been written become part of the fabric of the book the blog has become, and in so doing to influence the future trajectory of the blog-as-book, which means the ending of the book you’re reading and about whose ending you are curious has now been influenced by you the reader as you act upon the writer by responding to what he has already written but has not yet finished.
If this seems newfangled and Back to the Future-ish (I briefly worried about the possibility of erasing my own existence, but, fortunately, time is only moving in one direction, for now), maybe it’s not. It seems likely to me that writers who serialized their novels in magazines or newspapers before they appeared in book forms (Dickens, for example, or Dostoevsky), and their readers, might well have been candidates for similar experiences. Ditto writers whose books appear in successive volumes over time, before they are complete — Cervantes, Proust, more recently Murakami. Or writers of trilogies or quartets — Updike, or Justin Cronin’s, which is one volume in progress.
This would be a useful subject for inquiry, I’d think — how does the reception of an in-progress book by its readership impact the future trajectory of that work. And then, of course, we’re soon thinking about the entire arc of a writer’s career, where these matters likely influence future work more often than we purists might imagine. Almost all the time, would be my guess, even if your name is Thomas Pynchon or Cormac McCarthy. Even Salinger’s great long silence seems a function of his response to the audience’s response to his work.
Maybe literature is more of a two-way conversation than we would prefer to imagine.
Sometimes You Don’t Recognize What’s In Front of You Until A Writer Makes It Clear for You
When I was a child, my father worked in air conditioning. I never thought that was a particularly high calling, even though we lived in Florida, in the heat, and even though I seldom felt the heat when I was indoors, since the default indoor condition of everything in Florida was cool, comfortable air, or sometimes air that was uncomfortable because it was too cold. I never figured out the value of what my father did until I read Arthur Miller’s essay “Before Air Conditioning.” Here is a representative paragraph:
“Given the heat, people smelled, of course, but some smelled a lot worse than others. One cutter in my father’s shop was a horse in this respect, and my father, who normally had no sense of smell — no one understood why — claimed that he could smell this man and would address him only from a distance.”
The Poetics of Non-Arrival: KAFKA
Illustration by Shaun Tan
“Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider, but lie prostrate on the ground.”
–Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer, 1916
He was talking about the Jewish horse and the German horse
(But there is also the Czech horse.)
What horse did Kafka ride?
Where does Kafka belong?
Who owns Kafka? *
These sentences kill me.
Imagine: prostrate on the ground.
That’s what an exilic existence is like
Prostrate on the ground.
Living in the place that is no place
Riding the no horse
Going nowhere, only not-here
With no language
Never quite comfortable in any language. **
When the narrator in the story “My Destination” is asked where he is going
He says,
“I don’t know.”
“Away from here, away from here.”
“Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.”
Always away, never arriving. ***
Butler: “…the monstrous and infinite distance between departure and arrival….”
Kafka: “For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.”
.
.
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NOTES
* [I love this essay about Kafka by Judith Butler.]
** [Butler: “We find in Kafka’s correspondence with his lover Felice Bauer, who was from Berlin, that she is constantly correcting his German, suggesting that he is not fully at home in this second language. And his later lover, Milena Jesenská, who was also the translator of his works into Czech, is constantly teaching him Czech phrases he neither knows how to spell nor to pronounce, suggesting that Czech, too, is also something of a second language. In 1911, he is going to the Yiddish theatre and understanding what is said, but Yiddish is not a language he encounters very often in his family or his daily life; it remains an import from the east that is compelling and strange. So is there a first language here?”]
*** [Kafka: “Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.”]
Shop of work, or something like that
So, I’m teaching a grad-level fiction workshop for the first time next fall. I’m excited and nervous. It feels like a big deal. In my pedagogical statements, I write about how many fiction students don’t know how to read. That is, they read like they’re lit majors: they read for analysis and to say something clever about the text. (I was no exception before and during my MFA.)
BUT, but, writers read in a fundamentally different way. We read with our own writing in mind: what works, what doesn’t, what should we take from this writer, what does this writer do that we also do that fails, etc.
My undergrad fiction workshops are always very reading heavy. We read something like 8-10 books. Every book comes with some kind of “craft” lesson. I attempt to teach students how to read as a writer. Mostly, it works.
persnickety 11 sleep chucks
8. Slate says DFW would not have sent Pale King to a publisher. Awkward analogy alert:
9. Now that Amanda Hocking has sold out to become a go-go-gillionairre, Forbes weighs in.
Nine. The new JMWW is out.
10. Kevin Brockmeier interview.
I broach my sentences one tiny piece at a time. That’s always how it is for me — slow and considered. I’ll work and work at one little cluster of words. Then, when its rhythms are in place, I’ll move on.
11. John Gardner Fiction Contest ends in 9 days.
12. Ever watched video of your own self reading? How did that go?